In August I got slowly but completely sucked into fly fishing. What was supposed to be an occasional holiday hobby started to turn into something I had to do also regularly in Belgium, so I spent hours and hours trying to figure out where can one fly fish closer to home (and in general I was using YouTube 90% of the time to learn about fly fishing techniques). In the meantime my brother stopped by for a day (we could not go flying as the plane I booked had a technical issue, so we went for brunch, bubble tea, and acted like tourists in Leuven), and I also took more of my friends (Hao and Jade) flying. The weather was finally great, life was good. I got some cheap waders from the Decathlon (and more and more gear), I went back to the Schulensmeer with Willem (caught some small fish), then I went to discover a not too distant smaller river (Mehaigne) making my way across the language border for the first time (to fish), but the real turning point came when we went away for a weekend to Stavelot with Clio. This was the first time I was properly fly fishing, wearing waders, standing in a larger river with clear water, surrounded by the forest, and I was enjoying it very much, even before I caught the first fish. And what a beautiful 30 cm brown trout that first fish was! I never knew that there was such beautiful fish in these rivers. An hour later I caught another one (slightly bigger, but less colourful) using the same dry dropper fly (a dry fly with a nymph under it). At that moment I knew that I will have to do this more often. And by the way the weekend was very good outside of the fishing too, we stayed at a nice hotel with great food, had a small hike, etc. But I knew I would come back to this river. The next week I was out cycling when I decided to have a look at one of the nearby tiny rivers (the Ijse), as I saw on the Flemish fishing map that there was supposedly even trout in its waters. I was very sceptical, but as I stopped on the first small bridge where my route crossed the river and looked down, I immediately spotted a fish. I got curious, so I left the asphalt roads and slowly made my way along a couple of kilometers long section of the river (following a shared walking/cycling gravel path), and to my biggest surprise I have seen an abundance of fish and a seemingly unexpectedly healthy-looking ecosystem. Three days later I went back with Clio, and managed to catch two smaller (20 cm) chub on the dry fly. While the fish seemed unbothered by my biking along the river just a few days earlier, this time it was very difficult to get close to them. This tiny river was definitely proving to be an exciting and interesting challenge. A day later I finally managed to do my German airport-hopping day-trip with the plane, landing at 4 different airports (3 in Germany, of which 2 were new for me). I made 4 videos out of this day, which were published over the winter months: Charleroi (EBCI) to Trier-Foehren (EDRT), Trier-Foehren (EDRT) to Koblenz-Winningen (EDRK), Koblenz-Winningen (EDRK) to Aachen-Merzbrueck (EDKA), and Aachen-Merzbrueck (EDKA) to Charleroi (EBCI). At the end of the month we flew to Bologna (arches everywhere, the two towers, good pizza and pasta), then we made it to a villa near Fano to celebrate the wedding of Nora and Cole (a.k.a. my cycling padawans from COVID, who also came to Girona with us in 2022). It (the weather) was very very hot, but similarly nice. Unfortunately on the second day of the wedding I started feeling sick, so I did not get to enjoy the last day in Bologna afterwards.